For fourteen years, I had a rotten little chihuahua named Ethel, who was a malevolent scheming weasel. I didn't realize it at the time, but learning to speak "malevolent scheming weasel" was great training for understanding the press releases that AWS puts out semi-regularly. Today, the OpenAI polycule put out a whole swath of press […]
CloudFront now offers bundle pricing, which is handy—but also confusing. Let’s dive in…
We’ve long been known for our hot takes on cloud at Duckbill, and here’s the hottest one: the cloud isn’t expensive. “Expensive” implies a judgment, a comparison. If cloud is expensive, what’s it expensive compared to? Every argument we’ve heard is one considered in isolation, rather than in the full context of the business. Cloud […]
AWS launches Database Savings Plans after years of customer requests, offering discounts up to 35% on serverless databases and 20% on instances across services.
Introducing Skyway: contract management for enterprise cloud spend. Built by the team overseeing tens-of-billions in enterprise cloud spend.
For eight years, I’ve watched the same story play out: excited newcomers sign up for AWS thinking they have a free account, only to get blindsided by unexpected charges.
Well, the internet did what the internet does best this week: it collectively lost its mind over a number in an S-1 filing. Figma disclosed they signed a ~$550 million contract with AWS, someone used arithmetic (the secret weapon of Cloud Finance) to determine that this was roughly $300,000 per day on AWS, and suddenly everyone with a social media account became a cloud economics expert.
In short: Amazon’s Aurora DSQL is a technical marvel, but its pricing is absolutely baffling. And I mean just that. They’re not gouging customers. It’s not unfair. How they arrived at their pricing makes sense given the product’s development constraints (presumably including things such as “thou shalt not lose us our corporate ass on this service, as we cannot make it up in volume”). It’s just monumentally confusing.
Underwater? Let’s go swimming. You have options…
There’s a continuum, with “Innovation” on one end and “Optimization” on the other. Where are you?
Finally! AWS brings tiered pricing to Lambda’s CloudWatch logs, potentially saving high-volume customers thousands, and adds S3 and Firehose as new logging destinations.
AWS is excluding newer RDS instance types from Reserved Instance purchases. Is this oversight or the quiet continuation of their RI deprecation strategy?